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Help:IPA for English
Throughout Wikipedia, the pronunciation of words is indicated by means of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The following tables list the IPA symbols used for English words and pronunciations. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to Wikipedia and differ from those used by dictionaries. If the IPA symbols are not displayed properly by your browser, see the links below. Key If the words illustrating two symbols sound the same to you (say, if you pronounce cot and caught the same, or do and dew, or marry and merry), you can ignore the difference between those symbols. Footnotes explain some of these mergers. (See also Dialect variation below.) For a table listing all spellings of these sounds, see . For help converting spelling to pronunciation, see . | style="vertical-align: top" | |} Notes * The IPA stress mark ( ) comes before the syllable that has the stress, in contrast to stress marking in pronunciation keys of some dictionaries published in the United States. * Words in are the standard lexical sets. Words in the lexical sets and may be given two transcriptions, respectively one with and one with , or one with and one with , rather than with the variable-vowel symbols in the key above. Dialect variation This key represents diaphonemes, abstractions of speech sounds that accommodate General American (GenAm), Received Pronunciation (RP), Canadian English, South African, Australian, and New Zealand pronunciations. Therefore, not all of the distinctions shown here are relevant to a particular dialect: * If, for example, you pronounce cot and caught the same, then you may simply ignore the difference between the symbols and , just as you ignore the distinction between the written vowels o'' and ''au when pronouncing them. * In many dialects, occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it, as in cart . * In other dialects, ('y'es) cannot occur after , etc., within the same syllable; if you speak such a dialect, then ignore the in transcriptions such as new . For example, New York is transcribed . For most people from England and for some New Yorkers, the in is not pronounced; for most people from the United States, including some New Yorkers, the in is not pronounced and may be ignored. On the other hand, there are some distinctions which you might make but which this key does not encode, as they are seldom reflected in the dictionaries used as sources for Wikipedia articles: * The difference between the vowels of fir, fur and fern, maintained in Scottish and Irish English but lost elsewhere. * The difference between the vowels of pain and pane found in some English, Welsh, and Newfoundland dialects. * The vowels of bad and had, distinguished in many parts of Australia and the Eastern United States. * The vowels of spider and spied her, distinguished in Scotland and some parts of North America. Other words may have different vowels depending on the speaker. The pronunciation of the vowel in Scotland, Wales and northern England has always been closer to , even amongst educated speakers. BBC English is moving away from the older RP towards the more open vowel , and the Oxford English Dictionary transcribes the lad, bad, cat, trap vowel as in its updated entries. For more extensive information on dialect variations, you may wish to see the IPA chart for English dialects. Other transcriptions If you feel it is necessary to add a pronunciation respelling using another convention, then please use the conventions of Wikipedia's pronunciation respelling key. * To compare the following IPA symbols with non-IPA American dictionary conventions that may be more familiar, see pronunciation respelling for English, which lists the pronunciation guides of fourteen English dictionaries published in the United States. * To compare the following IPA symbols with other IPA conventions that may be more familiar, see , which lists the conventions of eight English dictionaries published in Britain, Australia, and the United States. See also * If your browser does not display IPA symbols, you probably need to install a font that includes the IPA. Good free IPA fonts include Gentium and Charis SIL (more complete); a monospaced font is Everson Mono which is complete; download links can be found on those pages. * For a guide to adding pronunciations to Wikipedia articles, see the template. * For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation#Entering IPA characters. * Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key Notes References External links * Getting JAWS 6.1 to recognize "exotic" Unicode symbols—For help on getting the screen reader JAWS to read IPA symbols * IPA TTS (text-to-speech) bookmarklet English